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I've answered this question in many other threads at this point, but since you're now the top comment:
Proton Drive and Mail still require you to trust them to serve you Javascript that doesn't snoop on your plaintext content. They don't have any way of proving that their web app isn't taking your plaintext emails (which you can read in your browser and therefore they are visible to Javascript on that page) and sending it back to their server.
Is their JS code open source? If so, I don't see any real differences between an extension and JS code. Unless extensions have less privileges or something. The user will have to either trust the code or inspect it themselves regardless if it's an extension or JS code.
Just FYI: I think since manifest 3 or so you do need explicit permissions to access a sites HTML. And the end user can see which sites the extension has access to. Doesn't make me install more extension than I really have to though.
Extensions can have more access.
They can snoop / manipulate across tabs or even scan the local drive and execute system commands... when given the access.
I had to make one for work once to let a web app run a legacy command prompt system. The web app's search was better, but the users wanted to edit with the old tool.
It was kind of interesting the way it worked. Not remembering the full details, I created an extension and a batch script and had to register the batch script with a group policy and declare the extension's permission to run that batch script
Then the users could search a client in the web app and press a button to bring up their profile in the prompt app.
Not a recommended approach for public facing apps.
*Edit: No! It wasn't a batch script... exactly... it was a C# app compiled to .dll that accepted client id as an argument
The difference is that JS code served by a web server can change at the server's whim, and there is no standard way to verify that it matches what you expect except by reading it every time you visit the page.
With an extension, assuming you trust the browser itself, you can check that the extension matches its source, and you only need to do that once per install.
That's true. On the other hand, the extension gains a much larger attack surface since it has access to a lot more data (every site you visit vs. only the site that serves the JS code). At the end of the day, people wouldn't use your site if they didn't trust your site, especially if they use it for privacy and integrity reasons, so for most users I think JS is the better option. I suppose there's no reason you can't offer both though.
I think that's the prevailing sentiment in this thread. People would rather trust the site to run the code as advertised and get some added convenience rather than verify the code for themselves.
Perhaps it makes more sense to have an extension that checks that the served javascript is correct? That should be a very simple, basic extension that doesn't increase the attack surface much. Users who care to verify the code can use that and everyone else can live with the convenience.
Not sure if it makes much sense, it's probably more work than it's worth and maybe leads to doing the same thing twice.
One way to not place full trust on the "server" IMO is to make the JS open source and use jsDelivr or unpkg or some other 3p service to serve the JS so that it's not in the website's control. Independent.
Interesting perspective, though of course as the MX sending and receiving all the messages in the first place, they probably wouldn’t need to do it at the browser level.